The China Eastern Airlines logo is pictured at Beijing Capital International Airport in Beijing, China, March 21, 2022. REUTERS / Tingshu Wang
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BEIJING, April 17 (Reuters) – China Eastern Airlines (600115.SS) has restarted its Boeing 737-800 aircraft for commercial flights less than a month after a crash killed 132 people and caused the company to land. 223 by plane, the carrier said Sunday.
The airline said it had conducted systematic tests, structural checks and verified airworthiness data for each of the aircraft, and that test flights would be performed on all aircraft before they resumed commercial services.
Boeing 737-800 aircraft with registration numbers close to the one that crashed on March 21 are still undergoing inspections and maintenance assessments, the company said in a statement to Reuters.
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Flightradar24 data showed earlier in the day that China Eastern flight MU5843, operated by a three-year Boeing 737-800 aircraft, took off from the southwestern city of Kunming at 9:58 a.m. (0158 GMT) on Sunday and landed at 11:03 a.m. on Chengdu, also in southwestern China.
The plane, which completed a test flight on Saturday, later returned to Kunming, according to Flightradar24.
Another Boeing 737-800 made a test flight early Sunday in Shanghai, where China Eastern is based, according to Flightradar24.
On March 21, flight MU5735 en route from Kunming to Guangzhou crashed in the Guangxi Mountains, killing 123 passengers and nine crew members in the deadliest plane crash in mainland China in 28 years.
China removed both black boxes and said it would present a preliminary report to the United Nations Aviation Agency (ICAO) within 30 days of the event. Read more
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Report by Stella Qiu and Ryan Wu; Edited by Muralikumar Anantaraman and Helen Popper
Our standards: Thomson Reuters’ principles of trust.
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